Economic Prehistory
I have worked on numerous projects in economic prehistory with Clyde Reed since about 2003. Much of our research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, with contributions from the Human Evolutionary Studies Program (HESP) at SFU.
Our main publication is a book called Economic Prehistory: Six Transitions That Shaped The World from Cambridge University Press (2022).
Here is the publisher's description of the book:
Around 15,000 years ago, most humans lived in small mobile foraging bands. The first city-states appeared about 5000 years ago. This radical transformation in human society laid the foundations for the modern world. This book uses economic logic and archaeological evidence to explain six key elements of this revolution: sedentism, agriculture, inequality, warfare, cities, and states. The authors posit that the ultimate cause of these events was climate change. They show how shifts in climate interacted with geography to drive technological innovation and population growth. The accumulation of population at especially rich locations led to the creation of group property rights over land and warfare over land among rival elites. This set the stage for urbanization and for elite-controlled states based on taxation. These developments eventually resulted in contemporary global civilization. This ambitious book is the first to provide a rigorous, yet accessible, analysis of economic change in prehistory.
The book includes formal economic models, but the overall narrative can be easily followed by archaeologists, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, and general readers. More than half of the chapters are new, and the others are extensively rewritten versions of our articles from economics journals. The book is more interdisciplinary than our journal articles and the literature reviews are more complete.
Click here to download the proofs of formal propositions for the above book (this is a PDF with 140 pages).
For people interested in the original articles, here are the links:
Click here to download the mathematical appendix for the above article.
Click here to download the mathematical appendix for the above article.
Click here to download the mathematical appendix for the above article.
Click here to download the mathematical appendix for the above article.
A 2005 working paper has a parameterized version of the model in our 2009 JEG article on agriculture. Click here to download this version.
The Second Conference on Early Economic Developments was held at Simon Fraser University on July 24-26, 2009. For a copy of the conference program, click here